Saturday, March 23, 2013

Easy to be a writer nowadays...

I can give you one good reason for the explosion of ebooks in the world -- the difficulty of writing a book is only a fraction of what it used to be.

It was really, really hard to write a book in the old days. Typing alone was a huge pain. I mean, misspell a word and you had to go back and whiteout the error and retype. A very time consuming process.

Typing my book into digital format has been an excruciating, slow and onerous process.

It was so much worse when it was a typewriter. (Heck, paper and copying costs alone could make you a starving writer.)

You thought long and hard before you started rewriting a manuscript. Sure, you could mark it up and cut it up physically, but eventually you had to type a readable version, and in so doing, you were more or less saying "This is it."

Or not. If not, you had yet another typing job to do.

So I truly believe that many people, while maybe inclined to write a book, found the physical process too demanding. Especially since the monetary rewards, then and now, were not great. Especially with the uncertainty that anyone would ever like it or even read it.

I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing -- just that it explains why there are so many more books now.

About Me

I'm Duncan McGeary, owner and/or operator for the last 33 years of Pegasus Books in Downtown Bend, Oregon. These days I'm writing books as well as selling them.
I'm the comic book guy. But even more so, I'm a book book guy. Books of all kinds. Big books and little books, children's and adult, fiction and non-fiction, hardback and paperback and trade paperback and graphic novels. Books with more words than pictures and books with more pictures than words. They are all part of the book world to me, and I love being surrounded by them every day.
I also have a second blog: Pegasus Books, where I list the product coming in over the next week.